Creditex Spins Out T-Zero for Post-Trade Messaging and Connectivity in Credit Derivatives, and more

Creditex Spins Out T-Zero for Post-Trade Messaging and Connectivity in Credit Derivatives

A new start-up platform, T-Zero, is launching to bring operational efficiencies to the credit derivatives industry. The platform is being spun out of Creditex, a leading player in the electronic trading of credit derivatives, which has incubated the new company. Creditex and T-Zero will be owned by a separate holding company, not named in the release.

Mark Beeston, a veteran credit derivative industry professional, will join T-Zero as president. Since 2002, Beeston served as chief operating officer of integrated credit trading at Deutsche Bank in London.

"T-Zero is designed to dramatically accelerate the industry's movement toward automation and will allow market participants to achieve trade data messaging and connectivity at a fraction of the current time and cost," stated Sunil Hirani, CEO of the holding company.

According to the release, T-Zero will address three challenges in the credit derivatives marketplace: lack of robust, standardized electronic messaging between market participants; deficient system-to-system connectivity between counterparties and need for a standardized workflow.

T-Zero electronically captures and redirects all trade details, assignments, allocations and other relevant trade details. According to the release, this is critical for tri-party transactions, like assignments or novations, where trades are assigned by the buy side to the sell side; and give-ups -- transactions where a prime broker acts as an intermediary between a sell-side and buy-side institution.

Branch Banking & Trust Co. (BB&T), based in Winston-Salem, N.C., went live with XSP -- Xcitek's software solution for corporate actions processing. In addition, Xcitek is providing the bank with corporate action data.

With the initiative in process, Brendan Farrell Jr., managing partner at Xcitek, said in the release, "BB&T is realizing the immediate results that automation brings to its daily operations. Specifically, automating the client notification and response component of the bank's corporate actions processing will lead to significant improvements in operational efficiency." In addition, BB&T is able to eliminate the high level of manual efforts that were required prior to implementing XSP, while reducing risk exposure for the organization, the release said.